Everything Changes

undo the first one. “Call me tomorrow, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    She smiles at me and heads uptown, toward her garage. I watch her walk away until she rounds the corner, and then pull up the collar of my jacket and head west, toward the subway, feeling strangely uprooted; a spectator to my own inconceivable actions. I cross Broadway to Seventh Avenue and the 1 and 9 trains, struggling to quell the powerful urge to run back upstairs to my office and reclaim the normalcy of my life. I can still feel Tamara’s lips, still taste her on my tongue, and it brings a crazy smile to my rain-soaked face. My cell phone vibrates and I instinctively lift it to glance at the screen. Six messages. Without removing it from my coat pocket, I know my Blackberry is heavy with unreturned e-mails. I turn the phone off in midring and jam it into a coat pocket, a move that feels every bit as reckless as kissing Tamara.
    Clay threw office equipment and kicked the walls, but I’m thinking that maybe there are other, quieter ways of losing your mind.

Chapter 19
    Rael and Tamara’s wedding. Jed, Rael, and I were leaning against the bar, drunkenly toasting our friendship, while Tamara and her bridesmaids posed for some impromptu photos on the dance floor. Jed caught me watching them and said, “Oh, no,” waving his hand in front of my eyes as if to break a trance. “Don’t do it, man.”
    “Do what?” I said, still staring across the room.
    Jed put down his gin and tonic and turned to face me, grinding an ice cube between his teeth. “I have one rule about dating,” he said.
    “No you don’t,” I said.
    “But I do.”
    “This from the man who lost his virginity to his aunt,” Rael said, snickering.
    “Ex-aunt,” Jed clarified. “She was already divorced from Uncle Phil.”
    “Oh, well, then that’s okay.”
    “Listen,” Jed said. “It’s a good rule.”
    “Fine,” I said. “Do tell.”
    Jed leaned back and took another sip from his drink. “Let me start by saying that rules for dating are like rules for being mugged at gunpoint. The very concept is flawed, since it flies in the face of one simple fact: you’re not in control.”
    I leaned back and sipped at my own drink, a whiskey sour. “And yet, you have a rule.”
    “Five words,” Jed said. He placed his drink on the bar, fixed me with a somber look, and paused for dramatic effect. “Don’t date the fucking bridesmaids.”
    Rael and I nodded sagely. “Wow,” Rael said.
    “Brilliant,” I concurred.
    “Go ahead, make your jokes,” Jed said, shaking his head sadly. “But remember this moment, because one day you’ll be sorry you didn’t take heed.”
    “Explain,” I said.
    “Bridesmaids are an optical illusion, aglow with excitement and ripe with sexual promise, an idealized version of the true woman beneath. It’s false advertising. Their hair and makeup are professionally done. Those gowns are designed to accentuate the positive, while any flaws are hidden beneath all that puffy crinoline. How else can you explain why they look so good in such ridiculous dresses? Plus”—he paused and held up his empty glass demonstratively—“you’re probably drunk.”
    Rael and I looked at each other and laughed.
    “I’m serious,” Jed insisted. “You get them out of that getup and it’s all there: the bad skin, the sagging breasts, and an ass that has somehow, magically doubled in size. And the tragedy is, if you’d met her like this to begin with, you might still have been interested, but the contrast to her idealized self is simply too much to overcome.”
    “Tamara was a bridesmaid when I met her,” Rael said with a grin.
    “The exception that proves the rule,” Jed said dismissively.
    But Jed had it wrong. It wasn’t the bridesmaids at whom I’d been staring. It was the bride, smiling as she came toward us at that moment, her hair pinned back to expose the graceful descent of her cheekbones, her tan skin luminescent above the scooped neck of her dress. In the year or so that she’d been dating Rael, I’d grown close to Tamara, and I was certainly aware of her beauty on an instinctive, male level, but she was my best friend’s fiancée, and I’d never taken it personally before. All through the ceremony, I’d been too wrapped up in my duties as best man to really pay her much attention. Now, though, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “So, Zack,” she said, grabbing me by the arm. “You going to dance with me or what?”
    “Go